Entering the garden, I had to bound onto the grass, to escape being run over by a pair of horses prancing round the curve, at my back.  I turned with a basilisk glare intended for the coachman, but instead met the astonished gaze of the very last eyes I could possibly have expected.  My glare melted into a smile, but not one of my best, though the eyes which called it forth were alluringly beautiful.

“Contessa!” I exclaimed.  “Is this you, or your astral body?”

“Lord Lane!” the lovely lady-of-the-eyes responded.  “But no, it is not possible!”

Just as I was about to protest that it was not only possible, but certain, I caught sight of the Boy, in the doorway.  As, at the Contessa’s word, the carriage came to a sudden halt, she reaching out to me two little grey suede hands, the slim figure at the door drew back a step, as if involuntarily; but there was no getting round it, my Italian beauty had made Boy a present of my name, whether he wanted it or not.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER XV

Enter the Contessa

    “She was the smallest lady alive,
     Made in a piece of nature’s madness,
     Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
     That over-filled her.” 
                                —­ROBERT BROWNING.

Here was a case of Mahomet, en route to pay his respects to the Mountain, being met halfway by the object of his pilgrimage; though to liken the Contessa di Ravello to a mountain is perhaps to brutalise a poetic license.  She is a fairy of a woman, a pocket Venus.  Gaeta is her name, and her sponsors in baptism must have been endowed with prophetic souls, for she is the very spirit of irresponsible, childlike gaiety.

Not that she has a sense of humour.  There is all the difference in the world between a sense of humour and a sense of fun, and truth to tell, the Contessa had no more humour than a frolicsome kitten.  She had always been in a frolic of some sort, when I had known her in Davos, whither she had gone because she thought it would be “what you call a lark”; and she was in a frolic now, judging by her merry laughter when she saw me.

Her great wine-brown eyes were laughing, her full, cupid-lips were laughing, and more than all, the two deep, round dimples in the olive cheeks were laughing.  Even the little rings of black hair on her low forehead seemed to quiver with mirth, as her head moved with quick, bird-like gestures.  She was dressed all in grey, and the cut-steel buttons on her dress twinkled as if they too were in the joke.

“Fancy meeting you here, of all places!” she said, in her pretty English, lisping but correct.  “It is a good gift from the saints.  We have had such stupid adventures, and we have been so bored.”

“We” were evidently the handsome, slightly moustached women of thirty-five, and the thin, darkly dour man of fifty who were with the Contessa in the carriage; and a moment later she had introduced me to the Baron and Baronessa di Nivoli.  I echoed the name with some interest.  “Have I the pleasure of meeting the inventor of the new air-ship which is so much talked about?” I asked.